Tiscali joins 2Mbps broadband fray

2Mbps broadband looks to be the new front line for ADSL price wars, as Tiscali joins the fray by reducing its price to ?17.99 a month. This brings it in line with Wanadoo, which announced a 2Mbps service at the same price last week, and BT, which promoted all its Broadband Basic customers to that bandwidth a few days ago. ...more

Microsoft stands firm behind HD DVD

Microsoft has reiterated its confidence in its decision to back HD DVD over Blu-ray in the battle for supremacy of the high definition optical disc market. According to Chris Lewis, Microsoft's regional vice president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa and the man responsible for the company's Xbox 360 gaming console business in Europe, Blu-ray smacks of another technology developed by Sony. 'Blu-ray right now reminds us of another technology from Sony: Betamax,' Lewis told Spiegel Online. ...more

Music publishers are restricting online growth - DiMA

The head of the body that represents online music services has said that music publishers' demands are restricting the growth of the industry. Jonathan Potter, director of DiMA, the Digital Media Association, said that unless publishers accept a smaller share of the digital music pie for songwriters, the online services will not be able to cut prices in order to better compete with the 'free' music available on p2p file sharing networks. Publishers receive about nine per cent of each track sold. ...more

Google adds Plus Box to finance searches

Google is showing off a new funtion for displaying extra search results, a Plus Box. Whenever the Plus Box icon is displayed it means a user has a shortcut to extra visual information. Currently, Plus Box results are limited to (American) financial information and map data, but 'we'll be using Plus Box for other kinds of information in the future, so stay tuned,' says Google. ...more

Handspring Visor wired for sound

Good Technology is to unveil its new MP3 player for the Handspring Visor at the DEMO Conference in California. The SoundsGood device connects to the PDA via the Springboard expansion slot, turning the Visor into a fully-fledged MP3 player. The device comes with 64MB of memory that allows the playback of over an hour of music. ...more